Kitty Corner: A new portrait of Frank Sinatra


What could be said of Frank Sinatra that hasn’t been said before?

This was the conundrum Gay Talese found himself in when Esquire commissioned him to write a profile of the singer in 1965. At the time, Sinatra was at the height of his stardom; hundreds of interviews of him had already been published. Leery of journalists, sick with a sore throat and perhaps more powerful than a Mafia boss, Sinatra did not once speak to Talese.

So instead, Talese talked to his son, Frank Sinatra Jr. He talked to his press agent, Jim Mahoney. He almost talked to his first wife, Nancy, but Mahoney got to her early and expressly forbade it, much to Talese’s chagrin. And he even talked to the woman who was in charge of carrying around Sinatra’s toupees “in a tiny satchel.” By the end, he had talked to over 100 people with varying degrees of proximity to Sinatra, all orbiting him like planets around a star. And what emerged was one of the best celebrity profiles ever written — a portrait of a man who had reached the very top and had nowhere left to go.

Talese is known as one of the pioneers of New Journalism, a form of storytelling that uses additional flair and flourish and occasionally takes certain liberties to reporting. Practiced by the likes of Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Truman Capote, it expanded the scope of what journalism could be. His narrative nonfiction style resembles John McPhee’s, another novelist I idolize — or, rather, McPhee’s style resembles Talese’s.

Talese set the standard for magazine profiles today. Without him, we wouldn’t have Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s kooky, indulgent profile of Gwyneth Paltrow; Caity Weaver’s unexpectedly erudite profile of Cardi B; or Edith Zimmerman’s breathless, smitten profile of Chris Evans — and these are just a few examples.

Sinatra has a special place in my heart, ever since I watched him alongside Gene Kelly in the 1949 film “On the Town.” He couldn’t hold a candle to Kelly’s dance moves, but Kelly’s thin, reedy voice was no match for Sinatra’s smooth dulcet tones. Throughout high school, “Frank Sinatra’s Greatest Hits” was the soundtrack that accompanied my SAT studying and essay writing.Sinatra has always seemed remote, untouchable, a God among men, by virtue of his astronomical success. By refusing to grace Talese with so much as a “Scram!,” Talese had the opportunity to write a profile that only added to Sinatra’s distance and inaccessibility. But instead, he did the opposite — and the result humanized one of the most imposing and influential men in history.

Kitty Guo is a junior majoring in journalism and computational linguistics. She is also the special projects editor of the Daily Trojan. Her column, “Kitty Corner,” runs every other Wednesday.